Pre-Flight Checklist: The Data Steward Mandate (Post #7 of 20)
Who is the Guardian of Your AI Galaxy?
Who is the guardian of your organization’s most powerful asset (your data)?
Do you have a CDQ (Chief of Data Quality)* in the C-Suite?
Made up title, real problem.
Without someone owning AI data quality, your AI efforts are at risk. Bad data leads to sloppy outputs, hallucinations, and ultimately lost growth and revenue.
Think of the “Guardians of the Galaxy.” They are a chaotic, powerful, and wildly eclectic collection of individuals (your aligned C-suite).
Their mission? Protect a single, incredible and often dangerous source of power: an Infinity Stone.
Your data is that Infinity Stone.
The “CDQ” or “Data Steward” role isn’t an existing role in Operations, IT or Security. But whether you call it “Chief Data Quality Officer” or a “Data Steward,” this role is the single most important hire for enterprise AI scale.
The temptation is always to hand this accountability gap to a leader with a team already drowning in tasks and tickets.
But AI represents a paradigm shift. We’ve officially entered a new galaxy. It’s a strategic game-changer, and it requires strategic thought to create an intentional organization that can support it.
You don’t hire a Data Steward to check boxes. You create the role to protect against systemic failure and safeguard growth.
This is not a budget question, but a structural integrity question. This is an opportunity to stop treating data quality as a cost center and start treating it as part of the C-Suite’s governance engine.
Every AI tool is only as trustworthy as the single person accountable for protecting its data supply.
In the current AI gold rush, organizations are pouring budgets into AI tools and platforms.
Yet, rarely does the line item for data governance match the investment in shiny tech.
This creates a massive, but preventable, risk.
According to Gartner1, global AI spending will reach $2 trillion, up from $1.5 trillion in 2025. And yet, they repeatedly identify data readiness and governance as the top barrier to scaling AI.
Without an intentional AI-ready data practice to support use cases, Gartner warns of a 60% failure rate.2 This results in those initiatives being scrapped, having delivered no business value. That’s the real cost of neglecting quality control.
Isolated success can’t scale. To successfully adopt an enterprise AI framework, you must first hire the single point of accountability for your data supply. That person is your Data Steward, or CDQ Officer.
3 Steps for Clarifying the Data Steward Role
Hire someone whose sole mission is to protect the AI data source.
This isn’t an admin role. It’s an executive mandate focused on continuous governance.
Own AI Data Classification. R/Y/G. Be the final accountable human owner.
Ongoing audits. Reject ambiguous or unclassified data sets.
Enforce the Single Source of Truth (SSOT). Eliminate slop and control access.
Decommission Legacy Data. Authority to shut down duplicate or contradictory sets.
Monitor Bypass. Catch any API calls or manual exports that skirt governance.
Provide the Source Data Confidence Score. Convert abstract quality into tangible metrics.
If confidence drops below an agreed threshold (e.g. 90%), flag or restrict AI use.
Test Flight: The Accountability Gap Drill
This drill exposes how dangerously diffused data ownership is today.
Choose your highest-value data set (e.g. quarterly revenue).
Email your exec team. “If this data showed a 20% error rate tomorrow, who’s formally responsible for fixing it?”
The response. If you get three different names, or “Finance” (a function, not a person), you’ve found your accountability gap.
The Outcome. Appoint a Data Steward for that domain. Make their KPI the Source Data Confidence Score.
Mission Debrief
How did it go? Were you surprised by the answers?
The Data Steward is the systemic insurance policy against catastrophic failure. By giving one person ownership of Classification, SSOT Enforcement and Confidence Scoring, you move from hoping for data quality to requiring it.
This dedicated ownership is the single strongest accelerator of your entire AI Adoption Flight Plan.
*And yes, if anyone’s hiring for the transformative role of “CDQ,” I’m officially interested. Star-Lord works for me, too.
https://www.deccanherald.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/global-ai-spending-to-top-2-trillion-in-2026-gartner-study-3740287#:~:text=Bengaluru:%20With%20Artificial%20Intelligence%20(AI,to%20$25%2C766%20million%20next%20year.
https://www.freevacy.com/news/gartner/gartner-reveals-60-of-ai-projects-with-data-issues-will-fail/6155